And because you can’t read things without seeing parallels to events happening to you, Saturday night’s raid gave me a chance to see two different situtations where there was a problem, and fixing it.

Friday’s raid was awesome. We had a new priest healer and a replacement ret paladin for our usual one who was out doing cool RL stuff. We one shot Halfus and two-shot V&T – our second kill, first kill for at least three people in the raid, and put them firmly on farm. We worked on Twilight Council until trash started respawning, then went and downed Council of Winds and Omnotron before quitting time.

Saturday night we formed up and went to take on Magmaw and didn’t have the easy time we were expecting. The new priest had killed him, but in a different raid. We had someone playing a hunter who usually heals, our substitute ret paladin usually tanks Magmaw and so hadn’t done chains before, etc. So we wiped a couple times. I noticed I was having a harder than usual time healing the raid, and the tank was doing a lot more dying than usual.

So Reversion wanted to give Logarithm, who is our Magmaw tank, a few suggesti0ns. He had the three of us switch to a separate vent channel so that they could talk quickly and efficiently. Because we know Log – he is my brother – and he knows we respect his skills, we knew he’d listen to what Reversion was saying and see where he could improve.

At the same time I was whispering the new priest. He’s a friend of Repgrind’s and had been doing a great job for us, felt like a great addition to the raid, but I didn’t know him as well. Again, neither Log nor the priest had done badly. They weren’t being called on the carpet. We were just having trouble with a fight we should have on farm, and needed to change things up a bit.

So I asked him for a little more aoe-healing help. We’d already switched so Kerick was beaconing me (because I get healer vision sometimes and let myself die!) and keeping Log alive. But even so, when Magmaw was mangling him, sometimes I had to throw some hots his way. If the raid was pretty healthy, that worked great, but if I was trying to keep us alive then it wouldn’t work.

The priest saw my point at once, we reminded people that Lightwell is their friend, Log made whatever changes he was planning to make, and we downed the boss next attempt. Picture perfect.

When there are things the whole raid, or large parts of them, are doing wrong, for instance, not getting out of fire fast enough, then the whole raid needs to hear the correction. (I just used up my daily allotment of commas there). When it’s a small change for one person, a whisper works well. A larger changeup makes Vent a good tool for discussion – but when the change only involves a single person, keeping it private can help make sure the person understands he’s not being called out or picked on. If Log or the priest had thought they were being accused of failing, it would have been harder for them to hear the advice. They weren’t failing, but when they made the changes the raid’s performance as a whole picked up.

I’m very pleased to have a raid full of people who can listen to each other and take suggestions. We are still at 6/12 but Twilight Council is on notice – if we’d had 3 ranged and not 2 in our best attempt Saturday night they’d be down now, 7% and we just had too much melee for that phase – and then we’re going to talk to Cho’Gall. (After we downed Magmaw, we one shot Maloriak. That was satisfying; it meant for the week, we had 3 one-shot bosses and 2 two-shots. Magmaw was our only farm boss to give us lip!)

Exactly! We knew something was up, and it was too weird for it to be a fail – figured it was something as simple as the wrong macro, been there, done that. You’re much too good a tank to not listen to good advice.

Great job on tanking V&T by the way, since you hadn’t been there for the first kill. You did so beautifully on that fight, even I could tell, and when I’m healing that’s saying something.

I agree with the private feedback if its only one person that needs to change something up. Sometimes, if you call out one person in front of everyone, the initial comment isn’t taken personally, but other people decide to chime in their two cents worth and then it ends up feeling like an attack.

Sorry to contibute to the dps roster problem this weekend. I swear I have nothing else planned for weekends anytime in the near future : ) But you can be rest assured, that while my sister and I are making our 7 course Italian-themed dinner, I will be thinking of the raid and hoping you downed that pain in the butt council!

True. A big factor is scale. Really blowing up something is not constructive. Constructive is one key measuring stick. The goal of calling someone out is to fix the problem. The secondary goal is to fix the problem without creating a new one. Sometimes the problem is not the real issue. For example someone might be slacking in general and that is causing them to miss some key thing. Well there the problem that needs fixed is them slacking. In that case it might help to call them out in raid. Done properly it might give them a little kick in the pants to wake them up and make them focus more.
You have to ask ‘what is the goal’ and ‘what kind of feedback will achieve the goal’.

Calling someone out in raid does several things.
1) It shames them publicly. This is a useful tool for motivating someone but has to be used VERY carefully with full consideration to respect for them and their likely reaction. But it IS a powerful tool. However positive feedback can also be a powerful tool. Other, more supportive or respectful motivating tools should be considered before calling someone out in public.
2) It gives the rest of the raid a sense of the overall strategy and what is being done. This is IMPORTANT. People that are wiping over and over need to know there are changes being made to the strat, even if they are not changes they personally need to care about. It tells the raid that their leadership is aware of a problem
3) It gives the raid hope. Calling something out in raid them that other people did something specific wrong AND that those people are now aware of the problem.
4) It sometimes shuts people up. Often when something happens several people will notice. They will know who screwed up and how. But they might not say anything. It is important for those people’s moral to communicate. They need to know that what they saw was not ignored or overlooked. Sometimes calling something out specifically, by name, in public can actually shut off people from harping on something. People tend to harp on something when they don’t think the point has gotten across. If a leader clearly, simply, SPECIFICALLY and without recrimination, calls out something that needs fixed everyone who thought they needed to chatter about something can satisfied. It is up to the leadership after that point to stop useless chatter or accusation.
5) Calling something out in public down plays something you DON’T want to blow up. If you take someone aside privately you are implying that the problem is SO big that you have to do that to fix it. Depending on the issue it could blow things up even more. It could damage someone’s confidence or make them angry and defensive. Plus it is in a way it is MORE shameful for someone to be taken aside. The rest of the raid does not know what was said. They are left to wonder what sort of butt-chewing-out took place.

In short (or not) there are a lot of factors in play and there is not ‘once size’ solution.